Changing European Visions of Disaster and Development. Vanessa Pupavac

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About the Authors

      Vanessa Pupavac is a senior lecturer in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham.

      Mladen Pupavac is a researcher and member of the Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice in the School of Politics at the University of Nottingham.

Acknowledgements

      The original idea for the book came from reading some lines of Sigmund Freud, describing the Dutch construction of the Zuyder Zee dam project completed in 1932 as a work of culture (Freud 1973 [1933]: 112). This took us to thinking about the hydro-electric engineering of Tesla, celebrated in his region of birth where Mladen was also born, and the construction of the Thames Barrier where one of Vanessa’s uncles worked as an engineer.

      We submitted the manuscript to the publishers at the end of January 2020, coinciding with the 67th anniversary of the 1953 North Sea floods, at a time when communities were being hit by serious flooding in the UK and elsewhere in Europe, and the day after the World Health Organisation announced that Covid-19 represented a global public health emergency.

      We thank the series editors Tony Burns and Ben Holland at the Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice, and Rebecca Annastasi colleagues at Rowan & Littlefield, Dhara Snoweden, Sathya Shree and their for their support of the book. Our research was facilitated by a grant from the Economic and Social Research Council and working on ‘A Shared Space and a Space for Sharing: A Transdisciplinary Exploration of Online Trust and Empathy’, led by Peter Bath with Julie Brownlie, Dave Boothroyd, Heather Draper, Nishanth Sastry, and others. We further thank Denis Abdić, Sabine Beppler, Andreas Bieler, Nenad Bobić, David Chandler, Rory Cormac, Ruth Davidson, Andrew Denham, Oliver Dodds, Paul Drury, Cees van der Eijk, Nicky Bean, Paul Eliot, Frank Furedi, Pauline Hadaway, Jo Herlihy, Dennis Hayes, Catherine Gegout, Mathew Humphrey, Gulshan Khan, Chun-Yi Lee, Jan Meyer-Sahling, Caitlin Milazzo, Ian Pegg, Chris Pierson, Denis Radić, Ljubo Radić, John Raglett, Wyn Rees, Julian Reid, Matthew Rendall, Bettina Renz, Stefano Saccomani, Lucy Sargisson, Alex Serafimov, Jens Sorenson, Eddie Tembo, Annemarie Walter, and Kevin Yuill.

      We are also grateful for the invitations to speak and the feedback we received at the universities of Birmingham, Derby, Gothenburg, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Northumbria, Sheffield, Westminster, and the Swedish Institute of International Affairs as well as the Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice at the University of Nottingham, and various city salons, conferences, or festivals, including at the Brunswick Inn in Derby, and the Barbican and the Wellcome Trust in London. We are indebted to long discussions with Mark Duffield and Jean Duffield. We also thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful recommendations.

      The book acknowledges extensive use of the following translations and other works:

      Goethe, Johann Wolfgang (1949 [1808]) Faust, Part I. Translated and introduced by Philip Wayne. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

      Goethe, Johann Wolfgang (1998 [1832]) Faust, Part II. Translated and introduced by David Luke. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

      Goethe, Johann Wolfgang (2009 [1832]) Faust, Part II. Translated and introduced by David Constantine. London: Penguin.

      The book contains excerpts from the following publications:

      Pupavac, Vanessa (2008) ‘A Critical Review of the NGO Sustainable Development Philosophy’, in Zheng Yongnian and Joseph Fewsmith (eds) China’s Opening Society: The Non-state Sector and Governance. London: Routledge, pp. 15–35.

      Pupavac, Vanessa (2010a) ‘The Consumerism-Development-Security Nexus’. Security Dialogue, Vol. 41(6), pp. 691–713.

      Pupavac, Vanessa (2010b) ‘From Materialism to Non-materialism in International Development: Revisiting Rostow’s Stages of Growth and Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful’, in Jens Sorensen (ed.) Challenging the Aid Paradigm: Western Currents and Asian Alternatives. Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 47–77.

      Vanessa Pupavac (2014) ‘Natural Disasters: Trauma, Political Contestation and Potential to Precipitate Social Change’, in Erica Resende and Dovile Budryte (eds) Memory Trauma in International Relations: Theories, Cases and Debates. London: Routledge, pp. 74–91.

      This book would have been impossible without study leave from the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham and support from Tony Simmonds and his fellow librarians and IT colleagues.

      Finally we thank Jelena and Carl, who visited Nikola Tesla’s home village of Smiljan with us, and most of the Croatian towns, villages, and mountains mentioned in this book.

Chapter 1 Faustian Visions of ‘A Free People Standing on Free Land’

      Here there shall be an inland paradise:

      Outside, the sea, as high as it can reach,

      May rage and gnaw; and yet a common will,

      Should it intrude, will act to close the breach.

      So proclaimed Faust in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s epic poem (Goethe 1832 Act V ‘The Great Forecourt of the Palace’ in Luke 1998: 223). The blind and dying Faust was in a hurry to complete his vision. Mephisto was hovering over Faust’s frail body, ready to snatch his soul. Faust had contracted a demonic pact to enjoy worldly powers, and the devil wanted to claim his due. Could Faust escape hell? Faust died overseeing a grand project to build coastal flood barriers, drain the marshes, and reclaim land from the waves. Faust’s redemptive act for humanity is a vision of a free society, enjoying liberty and security, cooperating with each other to maintain the sea defences and cultivate the fertile land.

      Our book returns to Goethe’s Faust as a focal point to review European humanist visions of ‘a free people on free land’, anchored by modern development and eradication of disasters (Goethe 1832 Act V ‘The Great Forecourt of the Palace’ in Luke 1998: 223). In our return, we follow the precedent of Goethe and His Age (1968 [1947]) by the Hungarian Marxist philosopher Georg Lukacs (1885–1971), whose study was written against the background of European totalitarianism and the shadow of war. He returned to Goethe’s work as ‘a taking-stock of the historical heritage’ and ‘a necessary start toward something new’ against the modern crises and the looming war years (1968 [1947]: 161). Goethe’s Faust itself takes stock of Europe’s historical heritage during turbulent times (Piper 2010: 65–68). The Russian poet Alexander Pushkin described Faust as ‘an Iliad of modern life’ (Pushkin in Lukacs 1968 [1947]: 157). Faust’s odyssey spanning antiquity to modernity explored human strivings to find meaning and create a home in the world. Literature helps us interrogate our lives and times and make sense of what matters. We may narrate the confusions of the present, recall the confusions of the past, and, through our capacity to forge meaningful narratives, imagine a renewed future. Our study focuses on Faust the Developer and takes up a key theme pursued by the American philosopher and Marxist humanist Marshall Berman (1940–2013). His All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (1988 [1982]) analysed Faust the Developer to explore the yearnings and contradictions of modernity more broadly. In taking these precedents, we share Berman’s definition of humanist modernism as ‘any attempt by modern men and women to become subjects as well as objects of modernization, to get a grip on the modern world and make themselves СКАЧАТЬ